[I am still unclear for whom this account is intended. What is this "posterity" for which I write so knowingly? Is the account for publication & circulation within the magical fraternity? If so, I must remove many of the personal details. One or two of my colleagues (including, of course, David Devant & Nevil Maskelyne) have published technical explanations of their illusions, & my great mentor, Anderson, paid his bills by regularly selling small trade secrets. There is a precedent. Circulation of this sort would be acceptable, although I think it should only be released after Angier's demise (his certain demise, that is). I presume it is not intended for general publication.
So long as I can continue to monitor how it is being written, then I may proceed with my account of how the illusion looks to the audience.]
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The New Transported Man is an illusion whose appearance has changed over the years, but whose method has always remained the same.
It has progressively involved two cabinets, or two boxes, or two tables, or two benches. One is situated in the downstage area, the other is upstage. The exact positioning is not crucial, and will vary from one theatre to the next, depending on the size and shape of the stage area. The only important feature of their positioning is that both pieces should be clearly and widely separated from each other. The apparatus is brightly lit and in full view of the audience from beginning to end.
I shall describe the oldest, and therefore the simplest, version of the trick, when I was using closed cabinets. At that time I called the illusion The Transported Man.
Then, as now, my act was brought to its climax with this illusion, and only details have changed since. I shall therefore describe it as if the early version were still in my current act.
Both cabinets are brought on to the stage, either by scene-shifters, assistants or in some cases volunteer members of the audience and both are shown to be empty. Volunteers are allowed to step through them, open not only the doors but the hinged rear walls, and peer into the wheeled space below. The cabinets are rolled to their respective positions and closed.
After a short, humorous preamble (delivered in my French accent) about the desirability of being in two places at once, I go to the nearer of the two cabinets, the first, and open the door.
It is, of course, still empty. I take a large, brightly coloured inflatable ball from my props table, and bounce it a couple of times to show how vigorously it moves. I step into the first cabinet, leaving the door open for the time being.
I bounce the ball in the direction of the second cabinet.
From within, I slam closed the door of the first cabinet.
From within, I push open the door of the second cabinet, and step out. I catch the ball as it bounces towards me.
As the ball enters my hands the first cabinet collapses, the door and three walls folding out dramatically to show that it is completely empty.
Holding the ball I step forward to the footlights, and acknowledge my applause.
Let me briefly rehearse my life and career up to the last years of the century.
By the time I was 18 I had left home and was working the music halls as a full-time magician. However, even with help from Mr Maskelyne, jobs were hard to find, and I became neither famous nor rich and did not earn my own place on the bill for several years. Much of the stage work I did was assisting other magicians with their performances, but for a long time I paid the rent by designing and building cabinets and other magical apparatus. My father's cabinet-making training stood me in good stead. I built a reputation as a reliable inventor and ingйnieur of stage illusions.
In 1879 my mother died, followed a year later by my father.
By the end of the 1880s, when I was in my early thirties, I had developed my own solo act and adopted the stage name Le Professeur de la Magie. I regularly performed The Transported Man in its various early forms.
Although the working of the illusion was never a problem, I was for a long time dissatisfied with the stage effects. It always seemed to me that closed cabinets were not sufficiently mysterious to raise audience expectations of peril and impossibility. In the context of stage magic such cabinets are commonplace. I gradually found ways of elaborating the illusion; first to boxes that looked barely large enough to hold me, later to tables with concealing flaps, then finally, in a bravura move to "open" magic, much applauded in magic circles at the time, I used flat benches on which my body could be seen by everyone in the audience up to the moment of transformation.
In 1892, though, came the idea I had been seeking. It happened indirectly, and the seed it sowed took a long time to germinate.
A Balkan inventor by the name of Nikola Tesla came to London in the February of that year to promote certain new effects he was then pioneering in the field of electricity. A Croatian of Serbian descent, with an allegedly impenetrable foreign accent, Tesla was to deliver several lectures about his speciality to the scientific community. Such events occur fairly frequently in London, and normally I would take little notice of them. However, in this case it turned out that Mr Tesla was a controversial figure in the USA, involved in scientific disputes about the nature and application of electricity, and it ensured him widespread reporting in the newspapers. It was from these articles that I was to glean my ideas.
What I had always needed was a spectacular stage effect, partly to highlight the effect of The Transported Man, and partly to mask its working. I gathered from the news reports that Mr Tesla was able to generate high voltages which could be made to flash and spark about, harmlessly and without incurring burns.
After Mr Tesla had left to return to the United States his influence remained behind him. It was not too long before London and other cities began supplying small amounts of electricity to those who could afford to buy it. Because of its revolutionary nature, electricity was often in the news, being applied to this task or solving that problem, and so on. Some time later, when I heard that Angier was mounting an imitation of The Transported Man, I began to think I should develop the illusion once again. I realized that without much difficulty I could probably apply electricity to my requirements and began a search through the obscure stocks of London scientific dealers. With the assistance of Tommy Elbourne, my ingйnieur , I eventually managed to build stage equipment for The New Transported Man. I was to go on adding to and improving it for years afterwards, but by 1896 the new effect had permanently entered my stage show. It caused a commotion of acclaim, ringing cash tills and fruitless speculation as to my secret. My illusion worked in a blinding flash of electrical light.
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I will backtrack a little. In October 1891 I had married Sarah Henderson, whom I had met while I was taking part in a charity show performed in a Salvation Army hostel in Aldgate. She was one of the volunteer helpers, and during the interval in our performance she had sat informally with me while we both drank tea. My card tricks had amused her, and she teasingly challenged me to perform some more for her alone, so that she might see how I did them. Because she was young and pretty I did so, and greatly enjoyed the bafflement I saw in her eyes.
However, this was not only the first time I performed magic for her, it was also the last. My skill as a prestidigitator simply became irrelevant to our feelings about each other. We became walking-out companions soon after our meeting, and it was not long before we admitted to each other that we were in love. Sarah has no background in the theatre or the music halls, and in fact was a young woman of not inconsiderable birth. It is a testament to her devotion to me that even after her father threatened to disinherit her, which of course he eventually did, she remained true to me.